You and I, Me and You

  I started rubbing my temples. “Please stop now.”

  “So there’s that, and how you’re crazy—that’s interesting, too. Guys who don’t know better interpret that as ‘high-spirited’ or ‘passionate’ or some ignorant shit like that. And you’re a cop and you get to carry a gun and do cool stuff like arrest Jesus. Also sexy. And Shiro’s a card-carrying badass and she might think she’s a teeny Asian-American chick, but she’s walking around with your hair and face and boobs, so that’s catnip to guys, too.”

  “One of us will have to kill each other soon.” I couldn’t look at him. I could count on one hand how many times I actively wished Shiro would pop out like a genie and save the day: this was absolutely one of those times. There had been times I’d been held at gunpoint and not wanted her to come out so much. “So you can stop now, okay?”

  “All this to say of course Gallo wants to get into your Little Mermaid panties. And if you don’t get that, you’re dumber than I ever thought, which gives me such a headache to even contemplate. The massive amount of your dumbness. It hurts me,” he whined.

  “But I said it’s irrelevant. And it is—I’m with Patrick. Assuming all the stuff you just said doesn’t lead him to dump me. Or that spillover from BOFFO doesn’t get him hurt or killed. I can’t believe he knows all that and he still made me waffles today.”

  George was giving me a look I’d never seen before: sort of pitying amazement. “Is that why you’re shacking up with him? You’re all mystified that he wants to be in your life, ergo ‘Hey, I think we’ll move in together!’?”

  “Well.” Was this so extraordinary? Couldn’t be. “Yeah.”

  “My head, my head—you’re killing my head.”

  “Sooo sorry.”

  “Thanks, but you’re still killing me. Look, Aunt Jane knows an almost-good thing when he gropes it. Oh my God. It just occurred to me. That poor idiot has to put up with all your crazy and he’s not even getting laid, is he?”

  Shiro, will you wake up already?

  chapter twenty-eight

  Frankly, Cadence needs to learn to stand up for herself more.

  chapter twenty-nine

  “Don’t bother to lie!” he barked, as if I’d so much as opened my mouth. Nuts. I was still here.

  “My sex life—”

  “Ha!”

  “—is none of your business. And my point was, I’m grateful to have my baker in my life. Why wouldn’t I be? He’s gorgeous, smart, and rich, and he loves me. He knows about the crazy, as you so nastily put it, and knows the crazy could spill over and get him hurt or God forbid killed and he even…” I lowered my voice. “I told him about BOFFO losing its funding and he already had a plan in place to cure my MPD.”

  George, who’d been leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling some more, jerked forward so hard he almost fell on the floor. “Sorry, what the fuck?”

  “I know! He offered to pay for everything so I could just concentrate on therapy.”

  “And you still didn’t shoot him in the face?”

  “Oh, very nice!” I snapped. “Yeah, it came off as a little ignorant and controlling, but he was thinking about me. He wants to help me.”

  “He wants to fix you,” George corrected. “Big diff. C’mon. We all get warned about this.”

  I said nothing. George was right. There were people who were drawn to people like us. People with, um, problems. They didn’t love us for ourselves, or in spite of our foibles. They loved us for them.

  “He’s not like that. He knew what he was getting into. He’s not afraid—not of what I am, not of any of me. Do you know how many guys have been scared off by Shiro and Adrienne?”

  George laughed again. “I never said Aunt Jane was scared. It’s the one thing I gotta give him. Let me tell you something you don’t know about your baker boy. He won’t ever scare easily. He won’t scare off. Someone like that? Who made himself rich and famous and skilled? That person, you threaten to bankrupt them, ruin them, they’ll always think they can do it again. They can be eighty and hacking out their last breath and they’ll think they can do it all again. You can scare someone like that, but not the way you think.”

  I studied my partner for a minute. We weren’t friends. Much of the time we weren’t even friendly. But we were something. “What happened to you?” I finally asked, which was a sizeable no-no in BOFFO politics.

  “Life. Same thing that happens to everyone.”

  “I don’t think so, George. Look, I appreciate what you said—”

  “No you don’t.”

  “All right, you’re right, but I know what you’re trying to do. I think I know what you’re trying to do. But I don’t think you can understand the situation from my per—”

  “Sure I can. You want to get married and settle down and ruin a family with him. Hey, I’m for that. It’s so romantic! Your kids should just start seeing a shrink in the womb, by the way.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  “I’m mean, not crazy. Sociopathy is not insanity. Check your Dee-Sum, honey.” In his usual horrible manner, George was referring to the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders or, as we sanity-challenged liked to call it, the Bible. And he was right. He was not insane by technical definition.

  “You could try,” I said patiently. “You could try and get well.”

  George’s laugh was so shrill and short he sounded like a small dog. “Then I really would be crazy. Have you ever seen the news? You know what? Forget the news. Never mind the stuff that happens to strangers; how about the stuff that happened to you? Who’d want to be back in the middle of that? Don’t you know how often I thank God my remorse button was burned out by the time I was ten? Why would anybody trade freedom for nightmares and feeling shitty and crying because you can’t do what you’ve got to because you’ll feel bad?”

  I said nothing. For once George wasn’t showing me a sliver of light; he’d jerked open the whole window. It wasn’t like him, and it made me both sympathetic and nervous.

  I didn’t answer and he dropped the topic. It was just as well, as I was too polite to say anything anyway. Maybe that was my superpower.

  chapter thirty

  It is not her superpower.

  chapter thirty-one

  “Hello hello, hello George and Cadence.”

  “Morning, Paul.”

  “God help us, it’s Rain Man.”

  I tried to kick George under the desk, but he avoided my foot with a cackle. He got to his feet, gave me a meaningful look and jerked his head toward Paul, then went bounding toward the kitchen for more coffee. I turned to my colleague, who was wearing the exact clothes he had yesterday, but clean—Paul must have had a closet full of khaki pants, pressed dress shirts, dark socks, and tan and blue penguin skimmers. “Paul, you never get me confused with Shiro or vice versa. Are we different colors?”

  He gave me a look I usually got from George: Duh, dumbass. “Of course. You’re pink; Shiro’s red, like Dr. Gallo.”

  Never mind what color Dr. Gallo is.

  “Why don’t you have a seat in George’s chair?”

  Paul gave the chair a glance of dark dislike, but he sat. I cleared my throat and said, “I wanted to give you a heads-up. Michaela let us know that BOFFO is … is undergoing … a fiscal restructuring.” That sounded unthreatening, right? “And you shouldn’t worry, because she’s working with some financial guys about the restructuring and things are gonna work out just fine, in the way that things do a lot. Sometimes. Work out just fine, I mean. So … just FYI.”

  Paul’s eyes, always magnified by the glasses, bulged like poached eggs. “BOFFO lost BOFFO lost funding?”

  Why did they decide I should be the one to break bad news to a genius? “That’s another way to look at it.”

  “That’s not that’s not that’s not—” Paul was on his feet, turning back and forth so fast his arms were flailing out like those inflatable tube guys at car lots. “Things don’t work out
fine sometimes things don’t work out most times, sometimes is more than zero but less than fifty percent and that is not sometimes!”

  This. This was why Shiro had left me a terse note and fled yesterday. Yes, I was a coward who hated confrontation, who had trouble standing up for myself. And Shiro never let me forget that failing in me. But who was the coward this time? Who fled from Paul and left me with it because she knew she not only lacked the skill set to deal with a delicately unbalanced genius we badly needed to hold together, she didn’t have the courage to even try. Not just a slut, thank you very much, but also a cowardly bitch.

  What is wrong with me this week?

  Moving Day and fallout from same. That’s what’s wrong.

  Focus!

  “Paul,” I said carefully, “you’ll still come to this building.” I hoped. “You’ll still do your work here.” I hoped. “We’ll still be here, too.” I prayed. “There might be different smells, or colors you’re not used to, but that happens when good things are on the way, too, right?”

  He was visibly calming down. Thanks, Jesus, wherever you are in the system.

  “You’ll still you’ll still be pink?”

  “Sure.”

  “And Shiro will still be red and and and Adrienne will still be orange?”

  “You bet.” Seemed likely, right?

  “And George—”

  “George will be black forever. BOFFO could blow up tonight and George would be black. George could live a zillion years and he would be black for every single one of them. That’s gotta be comforting, right?”

  Paul slumped, visibly relieved. “I heard that,” the poster boy for black said as he ambled back to his desk. “You gonna be okay, Paul? For you, I mean? And by ‘okay’ I mean ‘fucked up.’”

  “You could have just said lost lost funding,” Paul said reproachfully, leaping out of George’s chair like it had gotten hot. “I don’t need to come to a blue building to feed HOAP.2 crime stats even after I need to feed HOAP.3. My house is blue; I can do it there. My computer, too. And I’ve almost caught the man disappearing all the ladies of the black. Fiscal restructuring—”

  “Let me guess: wrong color? Paul, has anything ever been the right color? Have you ever thought how much easier your life would be if you were color-blind? Maybe there’s an operation you could look into.”

  As George passed me, yawning (though how he could be sleepy with so much black coffee in his black system I had no clue), I reached out and smacked the back of his head.

  “Ow!” I don’t think it hurt so much as startled the shit out of him. He grabbed the back of his head, spun, juggled madly so as not to douse himself with scalding black sugary liquid, and stared at me.

  “Antagonizing Paul just makes everything take longer, idiot. Now leave him alone.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you this week?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Are you Shiro pretending to be Cadence?”

  “You wish.”

  He nodded glumly. “I do wish. I’m not a fan of change.” Yeah, him and every other BOFFO employee.

  “Tough shit.” It felt so fine, I said it again. “Tough shit, Black George.”

  chapter thirty-two

  “I. Have had. Enough!”

  Hours later, Paul was skulking around doing whatever he did when he wasn’t freaking George out, and George, Emma Jan, and I were in one of the conference rooms, hip deep in files. Nothing like a morning of reading autopsy reports to make you want to skip lunch.

  George shoved away the pizza box (autopsy reports had no effect on his appetite) and began drumming his hands and feet up and down like a toddler trapped in the body of a grown man. I sighed in relief.

  “We’ve got photos and stats and reports coming out the ass and we’re no further with this fuck! And I’m getting a headache because we’re out of coffee!”

  “Tell the truth,” Emma Jan teased, “which one bothers you more?”

  “The headache, for Christ’s sake!”

  Black George was on his feet and pacing around the conference table, which was fine with us. Emma Jan even got comfy, leaning back and lacing her fingers behind her head as she watched. Her jeans, tan flats, and comfy Tar Heels sweatshirt made her look less like a banker and more like a banker on a Saturday.

  We didn’t mind the tantrum because it was a welcome break from reading quietly. We’d been buried in paper all morning; maybe we needed a new way of looking at things.

  “These people are linked!” George was still yelling, as if the conference room were the size of a ballpark instead of a conference room and if he didn’t shout, we wouldn’t hear him. “Just because we don’t get it yet doesn’t mean they aren’t.”

  “Okay,” Emma Jan said.

  “They are absolutely linked. Our guy was drawn to them; this was not random. Don’t get caught in the trap of looks or sex or race: there are all kinds of triggers for all kinds of serial killers.”

  “Right,” I said. We both pretended we didn’t already know what he was yelling. “That’s not a trap I want to get caught in. Good call.”

  “If your vics are male and female, rich and poor, white and black, et cetera, they have something that called to their killer. They all have that exact something. Find it.”

  “Oh, sure.” I whipped out my cell phone and began tapping away. “Adding it to the list. One, Pick up dry cleaning. Two, Find link to serial killer’s vics. Three, Buy toilet paper.” I looked up, thumbs still wiggling. “Good thing you paced and yelled. ‘Find it.’ Awesome. That’s the one thing we wouldn’t have thought of. Can’t thank you enough, Black George.”

  He slumped into his chair. “I hate it when you’re like this.”

  “I know I’m the new kid on the block, Cadence, but when have you ever been like this?”

  “Moving Day,” George and I said in unison. I went on: “I think we’re going at this backwards. We’re looking at what Sussudio’s done … let’s look at what he might do. We’ve got three vics: he cut one—”

  “Wayne Seben,” Emma Jan said.

  “Yes, and we’ve got one he hanged in her kitchen—”

  “Rita McNamm.”

  “And one he drowned in her tub.”

  “Carrie Cyrus.”

  “Yeah.” George was flipping through reports. “All killed in their own homes in ways they could have used to kill themselves.”

  “All right. So. Methods of suicide. Obviously—”

  “But you’re still gonna say it,” Emma Jan teased.

  “—we’ve seen hanging, drowning, bleeding. What else is there?”

  “Asphyxiation,” Emma Jan suggested. “But not by hanging. Suicide bag.”

  “Yes. OD’ing, carbon monoxide poisoning. And jumping. Shooting yourself. And suicide by cop.”

  “Some cops get all the luck.” George sighed. “Can you imagine? Fatally shooting some idiot and there are no consequences?”

  “Except moral ones,” Emma Jan pointed out (she was so cute).

  “Right! So, none.”

  “Let’s stick with methods people can use in their own homes. So…” I thought for a minute. “Poisoning themselves. Drinking drain cleaner or something.”

  “Immolation,” Emma Jan said.

  “Right right,” Paul said from the doorway. “Those are all blue. The scenes, though, the pictures—” He pointed to the stacks and stacks of files. “They’re blue. That’s it, that’s the problem, it’s been the problem, he’s trying for orange and he’s getting blue.”

  How wildly unhelpful I thought but did not say. “Paul, we need a bit more from you than that.”

  “Suicide is one color, murder is another.”

  We all sort of sat there as that thunderously simple concept sort of rocketed through our minds. My mind, for sure—and from the look on George’s and Emma Jan’s faces, probably all our minds.

  “Oh…”

  Fuck me, I guessed.

  “… fuck me,” George groaned. “Is th
at what it is? Is it that fucking simple?”

  “He’s not just making murders look like suicides.” Emma Jan had a look on her face I knew well—it was on my own now and again. She was thinking hard, feeling her way along a new idea, and talking out loud as she did it. “He’s going there … to help them? Is that what he thinks he’s doing?”

  “Shit, yes! He’s the good guy, right? They’re letting him down. They’re … he’s seeing them before he kills them. Like with Wayne Seben—he’s maybe trolling Dr. Gallo’s group, maybe other groups, too. He sees them, feels for them—thinks he does, anyway, the deluded shit.” It was hilarious to hear one sociopath disparage another one. “And then he … he…”

  “It’s like what we already knew,” I said. The idea was too big for my body to stay in one spot; I pulled a George and got up out of my seat. Instead of pacing like a caged hedgehog or prowling like a confused leopard, I sort of wandered around the table, touching the chairs while I thought out loud. “What our vics had in common. It wasn’t about race or sex or body type; it was their mind-set, how they viewed the world. They viewed the world as people who want out of the world. Our guy does, too, or thinks he does … or wants to. Kindred spirits, right? That’s what he thinks. That’s why he’s drawn.

  “So our guy, he meets them. He either makes up his mind about them right away or he hangs around getting to know them—if it’s the latter, that’s how we’ll get him.

  “So he decides about them, and goes to their homes to help them. Like George said, he thinks he’s the good guy in the scenario. He’s the hero. He’s there to help, and then the person he’s going out of his way to help backs out of the deal.” I shook my head. “I can’t even imagine how that must enrage him.”

  “Ohhhh boy,” Emma Jan said, and George nodded and followed my train of “logic,” if it could ever be called that. “He’s going to their homes to help them do this wonderful noble thing. Then they pussy out. Then he loses his shit. They broke their promise, right? This solemn sacred thing he was gonna help them do, and it’s turned to shit. So he kills them the way he was going to help them suicide, except he’s mega-ticked. That’s the rage we keep seeing.”